Late for cheerleading practice one fall evening 35 years
ago, Worsham took a shortcut through a driveway behind a row of houses near
West Spencer and Front Streets in Olney. She heard a noise behind her — a
man jogging in a gray, hooded sweatshirt.

“Excuse me, do you have the time?” he asked.

When the sixth grader from St. Helena School checked her
watch, the runner closed the distance between them and clapped his gloved right
hand over her mouth.

“How old are you?” he growled.

“I’m 12,” the startled girl whispered into the man’s palm.

“If you scream, you’ll never live to be 13,” he said as he
stuffed a blue-checked flannel cloth into her mouth.

It was 6:30 p.m., Nov. 26, 1979.

Worsham was one of 16 girls age 10 to 17 who were sexually
assaulted in Olney and Northeast Philadelphia that year by a man known to an
edgy, fearful city as “the Jogging Rapist.”

A welder and plumber from Northeast Philadelphia named
William J. Gray later confessed to the 10-month crime spree — among the
most heinous in city history, say retired police officers who have handcuffed
Philadelphia’s worst.

Gray was sentenced to 20 to 50 years in prison. Now age 70,
he has served 34.

But while the crimes were solved and the felon incarcerated,
Worsham, now a 47-year-old registered nurse in Ocala, Fla., says justice has
been only partly achieved.

That’s because Gray is up for parole next month, and Worsham
just can’t let him walk.

Gray has come up for similar consideration nine times.
Always he has been denied, in part because Worsham, a mother and a grandmother,
has written to the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole to say that Gray
wrecked too many lives to be allowed to go home.

Once more, Worsham is forcing herself to relive the rape by
writing yet another letter — a girl’s anguish still resonating in
adulthood. Earlier this month, for the first time, she accessed Google Earth to
view the exact spot where her attack occurred. This is so
creepy, she told herself.

Susanne Worsham says she is speaking publicly for the first time in hopes of getting Gray's parole denied.

Worsham has stayed up late after shifts at her hospital to
translate her ordeal into carefully crafted sentences. The trick, Worsham says,
is to find the right words to keep the cage locked, and freeze in place the man
who nearly cracked her apart decades ago.

It’s not just for the people Gray hurt; it is, Worsham says,
for girls he could yet turn into victims — girls who might still face
their own “event” from William J. Gray:

“It is mind-blowing to think about all of the lives this man
touched in such a horrific way,” Worsham writes. “His body may not work the
same, but those perverse thoughts remain … Young girls would not be safe … That
man robbed me and so many other young girls of our childhoods.”

Looking for an ally, Worsham has recruited a schoolmate from
St. Helena School through Facebook who was another of Gray’s victims.

Now 48, the woman did not know until last month that she had
the right to be heard. She plans to write a letter of her own to the parole board.

The woman also hopes to confront Gray in prison, something
Worsham did in 2002. On a cold day in January, Worsham sat across a table from
her shackled attacker and screamed: “Do you have a clue what 20 minutes with
you did to my life?”

Gray told her he was sorry. Worsham said she didn’t want to
hear it.

Capt. Kenny Schwartz, in 1979.

The cops don’t want to hear anything more from Gray, either.

In 1979, the Jogging Rapist was pursued with unprecedented
fury by the Northeast Detective Division, led by Capt. Kenny Schwartz.

A cagey but flawed tactician who would later stumble and
serve seven years in prison himself for drug-related crimes, Schwartz
discovered the rapist’s patterns, then maneuvered behind his bosses’ backs to
create an unheard-of 50-man task force to pursue the attacker.

In the days before DNA evidence or computer analysis,
Schwartz and his obsessed detectives adapted unorthodox methods —
including using a psychic and a hypnotist — and pushed the limits of the
law to capture the Jogging Rapist. Schwartz, now 76 and living in southern
Delaware, explained the cops’ excesses this way: “A lot of us had daughters.”

He would not mind if Gray dies in the State Correctional
Institution at Waymart, high on a hill near Scranton:

“I got no forgiveness for this guy. You talk to 16 young
victims who were raped and assaulted, that’s what happens.

“Believe me, he’s a murderer waiting to happen. What he’s
learned in prison is, next time, leave no witnesses.”

“We got a problem here”

Handsome and dynamic, Kenny Schwartz was an anomaly
in the police force of the mid-20th century: a Jewish commander in a city
institution as Irish as the Catholic Church.

He was born in Fishtown, his father a wholesale produce man.
Both Schwartz and Gray lived their formative years in the Northeast, attended
Olney High, and joined the Navy.

Schwartz rose through the police ranks and wound up running
the Northeast Detectives. He would later be convicted for participating in a
drug ring that distributed large quantities of methamphetamine between January
1985 and December 1986.

His later criminal activity aside, Schwartz says he
performed at his best on "the Jogging Rapist" case because children were
involved.

At first, Schwartz didn’t see the assault pattern. No one
did.

Gray began his attacks Feb. 24 in East Oak Lane, grabbing a
13-year-old girl and forcing her into an alley. He pulled down her pants and
lay on top of her — a case of indecent assault, not rape.

By early spring, six attacks had occurred, a mix of rapes
and assaults. But the crimes were not seen as the handiwork of one man.

Three police sergeants monitoring felonies throughout the
Northeast funneled the paperwork through normal channels without making a
connection. In those days, there were no computer programs or mapping tools
that would have recognized a pattern.

But on April

18, Schwartz heard about a rape the
night before by a man who wore gloves. The captain sat at his desk and stared
out the window in his office on the second floor at Harbison Avenue and Levick
Street.

Gloves in April? Were there other rapes by a guy
with gloves?

Yes, as it turns out. Schwartz called the inspector of the
Northeast Police Division.

“We got a problem here,” Schwartz told him.

The captain now demanded to see all incident reports on
assaults as well as rapes. Soon enough, as though speaking to him through the
pile of papers on his desk, Gray announced himself to Schwartz: a thin jogger,
hooded sweatshirt, gloves, attacking in the evening hours, only young girls.

A pattern.

Schwartz found a map of the Northeast, hung it on his wall,
then stuck six pins into it. Spencer Street, Oakmont, Kerper, Glenloch,
Fillmore, Elberon.

This is real, Schwartz said to himself.
This is happening.

He dreaded the next step: presenting this to Joe Golden, the
city’s chief of detectives.

Golden was difficult.

“Hell,” Schwartz said, “Golden was brutal. Old-timers hate
new ideas. And he didn’t like any ideas that weren’t his own.”

Schwartz uttered the words “serial rapist,” and Golden had a
fit.

“What are you, watching too much TV, Schwartz?” Golden, now
dead, roared. “There’s no such thing as a serial rapist. Get lost.”

“Mommy, he hurt me”

When the man in the hood knocked her down, Worsham didn’t
understand what was happening to her.

All she knew was that it must have been her fault, because
she had been late and had taken that shortcut.

The man told her to pull her brown, corduroy coat over her
head and not to peek. She forced herself to think of Disney songs, the sweet
music transporting her somewhere off the cold ground and above the man’s weight
and violence. “Whistle While You Work” played in her head in an endless loop.

The man stopped doing things to her, then ordered her to
count to 100. Worsham got to 50, then ran screaming out of the alley. An
elderly man walking his dog found her and brought her into his house, where his
wife made hot chocolate and called police.

Five uniformed officers showed up and brought Worsham to her
family’s home three blocks away.

Regina Dougherty, Worsham’s mother, was not startled when
she saw a knot of police officers on her front steps. Two of her brothers were
cops — it was an Irish family with 38 cousins, after all — and she
thought these were buddies on a visit, maybe looking for some dinner.

This was a safe and solid neighborhood, with cops in nearly
everyone’s family, and Catholic churches everywhere.

There were crosses on steeples, crosses around the necks of
little girls and boys who went to Catholic schools. Wasn’t God
watching out for the babies here? Dougherty wondered. Her faith had
offered an iron compact: You be good, your life will be, too.

“I was kind,” Dougherty, now 70, said. “I did ironing, made
dinner, had Easter decorations for Susanne and her brother and sister.”

Every Valentine’s Day, Dougherty would make a heart-shaped
meat loaf pierced by melted cheese arrows for the kids and her husband, Brian,
a stockbroker.

Husband and wife mixed bloody Marys and drank quietly as
their children slept.

“You go from insanity to silence and you ask, ‘OK, God,
what’s the next step?’

” Dougherty said.

She and Brian were still trying to process. And they just
didn’t know what to make of what a detective had told them at the hospital:

“We’re sorry,” the guy said. “We were following the suspect
before your daughter got attacked.

“But then we lost him.”

Schwartz’s end-around

If the chief of detectives refused to create the task
force Schwartz wanted, maybe Mayor Frank Rizzo could be reasoned with.

In 1979, Northeast Philadelphia had a population of more
than 400,000 — roughly the size of Pittsburgh — and was a teeming
enclave of white, working- and middle-class voters.

A mayor could lose his job for not shoveling the snow up
there. What would happen to him if he didn’t stop a violent pedophile?

Schwartz dialed the phone, and someone powerful answered. To
this day, he’s not saying who. Just an important go-between to circumvent the
chief of d’s.

“I might have had someone call the mayor,” Schwartz said
slyly, still smiling decades after his bold end-around.

Kenny Schwartz recalls the events of 1979.

Instantly, 50 cops were assigned to the task force. No
sex-crimes unit existed in those days. It was the Northeast detectives who saw
the victims’ faces.

“It became my and every other Northeast cop’s priority to
catch this guy,” Schwartz said.

But now a clock was ticking.

“You wanted this?” said a smarting Joe Golden. “You got it.”

He added profane marching orders about not messing up.

Schwartz made Lt. Gerald Baker his point man. It wasn’t a
hard decision. Baker, now dead, lived in the Northeast, was unmarried, without
kids — a bright bulldog who got results on the street and respect from
other cops.

There was only one problem: No one liked working with him
because he was difficult and demanding.

Schwartz ordered John “Jack” Maxwell, a rising lieutenant
and second-generation detective, to be Baker’s No.

2. Now 69, Maxwell
would go on to a distinguished career as chief of detectives himself, and head
of Internal Affairs.

Soon enough, Maxwell learned, “this case was it for Baker
— the One. It’s all he ever thought about.”

Baker put Maxwell in charge of a phone-tip line. Police had
been blanketing the Northeast with fliers, and were going to schools to preach
safety. They needed extra officers to handle the calls that were starting to
come in.

Lt. Gerald Baker (front) was the point man for Capt. Schwartz. Baker, now dead, lived in the Northeast, was unmarried, without
kids — a bright bulldog who got results on the street and respect from other cops.

One day, a middle-aged-sounding woman who would not give her
name phoned. She said she was a psychic from Alaska.

The cop who answered the call practically laughed her off
the line. When the officer mentioned it to Maxwell, he stiffened, then issued
an order: “If she ever calls back, make sure you get me.”

Maxwell, who was earning a degree in business administration
at night from Temple University, had read about psychics helping the FBI and
Scotland Yard. And he put stock in what he called “detective mystique” —
showing up at a crime scene and getting a “feeling,” a sense that someone had
touched an object, walked through a room.

Cops didn’t talk about it, but Maxwell was a believer. And
he says he himself possessed a quality beyond the five basic senses that’s
helped him in his work.

Years later, he would solve the slaying of a baby this way.
He made a man he suspected of helping the killer sit in a specific chair in the
Roundhouse — a chair that murderers had confessed in. It was as though
emanations from the seat coaxed the truth, or at least enough fear to inspire
confession. Whatever, it worked.

“You’re cool,” the man told Maxwell after he sat in the
chair. “The baby’s mom killed him. I helped get rid of the body.”

Once a week in the early afternoon for three months, the
Alaska medium would call and ask for Maxwell.

“I’ve seen him,” she’d tell the detective, unable to
describe the rapist’s face, but sure of other characteristics: He was a white,
working-class Catholic, over 25. He always fiddled with his car, was very
mechanical, wore gloves for work that smelled like oil or diesel fuel. And
there was one more thing: Wherever he went, there were kids around.

Police routinely withhold certain crime details from the
public so they could distinguish the true perpetrator from mere suspects. The
hyperintense Baker went a paranoid step further, not even telling other
detectives vital aspects of the attacks.

Almost no one knew that detail about the smell on the
gloves.

“Jerry never tipped his hand,” Maxwell recalled. “But when I
told him some of the things the medium had said, his body language changed.”

It’s possible the medium was really a well-plugged-in
witness who feared discovery. But Maxwell’s detective mystique convinced him
otherwise.

Later, Baker would confide in Maxwell that his reports from
the medium helped Baker weed through known sex offenders in the Northeast, and
look more closely at a man named William J. Gray after their first encounter.

“I’m glad you’re talking to her,” Baker told Maxwell. Then
he issued an order to the other detectives: “No more sarcastic comments about
the medium.”

Time went by as Maxwell and the team logged hundreds of
hours on the case. One day, the tip line rang and the Alaska medium was out of
breath. She had a message for the cop who answered the phone:

“Tell Maxwell I saw him again!”

Chasing thrills

William Gray sums himself up this way: “I was a
bad and angry person my whole life.”

He was sexually abused by his mother, who tried to bathe and
breast-feed him until he was 9, and encouraged him to touch her, he said. He
grabbed a baby-sitter's breast in 1951, when he was 8 years old.

His father, Harry, a plumber and a welder just as he would
become, beat him with a wide belt and, once in a while, the buckle. Harry, now
dead, was an alcoholic who cheated on his wife. His son would become like that,
too.

William Gray in 1979.

One night, Gray saw his father end an argument with his
mother by leveling a shotgun at her and cursing. She packed and left with
Gray’s little sister. It was the last time the family would be together.

“Something happened inside me when they left me that night
— the two women I loved,” Gray said.

Marie Gray, now dead, was a cashier on the Broad Street
Line. Gray, then 11, would ride the trains every night, looking for his mother.
When he found her, he would stand outside her booth until he was too tired to
hold himself up.

Under his father’s care, he became a budding criminal,
swiping cigarettes, candy, tires, cars. He was arrested several times as a
juvenile, and once as an adult for stealing auto parts from a gas station.

At Olney High, he was interested only in cars and girls, and
dropped out in the 11th grade. In 1960, the 17-year-old got into a fight with
his father’s new wife. Harry kicked him out, and Gray joined the Navy the next
day.

Gray left the service three years later and after he got
home, he felt the need to marry. He purposely impregnated his girlfriend, he
said, because he was angry that her corporate-executive father thought so
little of him. Gray married her in 1964, then divorced her in 1969. They had
three children.

“I ruined the marriage by cheating and running around,
drinking and riding motorcycles with guys who later became members of the
Pagans and Warlocks,” Gray said.

“It was a thrill for me to be wild. I worked when I felt
like it. I smacked my wife and told her to get out.”

“It was a thrill for me to be wild. I worked when I felt like it. I smacked my wife and told her to get out.”

When he was 26, Gray started having sex with 16-year-old
girls. They gave him a sense of power and control, he said.

Born with the “curse and blessing” of looking much younger
than his years, Gray attracted partners as young as 14 when he was in his late
20s.

“Mentally, young girls were the same age as me. I had
arrested emotional development. I never matured.”

At 31, Gray met and married an 18-year-old McDonald’s
counter girl. They had two children: “My son is probably 38, my daughter is
probably 34. I don’t know them.”

There weren’t many poor plumbers in the 1970s, and soon Gray
had enough money to buy a house on Sylvester Street. He and his wife agreed not
to have children at first, but when she got pregnant, Gray felt betrayed.

One night he delivered a belligerent warning: “Leave this
house so I don’t have to hurt you.”

She did. Gray soon was laid off from his job and started
dating a 19-year-old who was still in high school.

He drank 35 cups of coffee a day, smoked three packs of
cigarettes, was “plastered on alcohol morning, noon, and night,” and swallowed
sleeping pills like breath mints. He also smoked marijuana and abused speed.

Gray managed to find a welding job at a refinery in
Paulsboro, but he still felt crushing pressure to make his $250 mortgage, and
pay back money he owed a relative for the down payment.

He was starting to lose control, to fall out of orbit.

“I was feeling a hatred for all women, from when my mother left
me.”

”Raping spree”

In February 1979, a savage anger detonated within
Gray.

“That’s when I broke, I snapped. And I went on a raping
spree.”

It began with the 13-year-old girl on Feb. 24, after the sun
set at 5:47 p.m.

“In the dark, I changed. I started stalking the streets.
Raping just felt great.”

Gray saw the girl on Spencer in the headlights of his
powder-blue, 1970 Eldorado with a dirty, white vinyl top. He parked, got out of
the car, and ducked low in the shadows until he was on her.

“I grabbed her and told her to take down her pants. I laid
on top of her.”

The rage inside him began to subside, so on he went.

On March 25, there was a 13-year-old walking to the Disston
Rec Center in Oxford Circle. It was 8

p.m. when Gray seized her: “Come
on with me. Hurry up and run.”

He put his hand inside her bra, told her to take off her
pants and underwear.

“Everything, everything, everything!” he ordered.

He was getting more efficient. It helped if you brought
along lubricant, he said. He always packed Vaseline when going out hunting for
girls.

At 9:30 p.m. on June 22, Gray oozed out of the darkness in
front of a 17-year-old on Kindred Street.

“Pardon me, I don’t mean to frighten you,” he told her
before punching her in the head. She scratched, struggled, and screamed.

“I pushed her to the ground, and I finally got up and ran
away.”

No chance for a rape, but a lesson learned: Older girls are
tougher. Gray made adjustments and never attacked anyone over 16 again.

On July 17, Gray spotted a 15-year-old at 10:50 p.m. on St.
Vincent Street. He was peering at her from behind a tree. The sidewalk was
empty, so Gray ran toward her. She heard his footsteps.

“Who’s there?” the frightened girl asked.

“It’s only me,” Gray said.

He grabbed her and her legs collapsed. He didn’t rape her,
but it was still satisfying — exhilarating, really.

“The urge was a switch that went off in my head. Part of the
motivation was the sex, but that wasn’t all of it.”

Gray felt at ease in Olney and the Northeast. The schools,
churches, driveways; the tight streets and familiar houses; the deep darkness
that streetlights couldn’t illuminate — all of it provided comfort and
cover.

William Gray's car is parked outside his home in 1979. (Photo Courtesy CBS3 Philadelphia, www.cbsphilly.com)

“I waited till a young girl broke off from a group and was
walking by herself. I’d drive ahead, wait in the bushes, and jump out.”

Then came Susanne Worsham. He remembered the attack as
fairly routine:

“I followed her, and parked by a church. I grabbed the girl.
I told her to take her pants down, and I raped her.”

Gray didn’t know she had never kissed a boy, had once gotten
a certificate from Mayor Rizzo for a fire-safety essay she had written. Gray
didn’t know she was human.

He only knew he was getting away with it.

“On the way home I threw the gloves and a bottle of Vaseline
away on Tookany Creek Parkway.”

There would be no evidence for police to recover.

“I felt smarter than the cops.”

Serial rapists are more likely to display criminally
sophisticated behavior to avoid detection than rapists who attack women they
know, experts say. And stranger rape is rare; a woman is 20 times more likely
to be assaulted by someone she knows.

As the attacks mounted, these were not just faceless lawmen
Gray was beating. He was even eluding his sister’s husband, a cop assigned to
the Northeast who was pursuing the Jogging Rapist.

“It all was like being on a drug — an adrenaline
trip,” Gray said.

Pressure’s on

Nine months after the Jogging Rapist had begun
his rampage, Joe Golden was on the phone.

“He’s still doing it!” the chief of d’s screamed at
Schwartz. “All these men, and you still can’t do anything about it?”

His calls were becoming more frequent.

One of the victims lived near Schwartz’s house. As if the
cops needed even more incentive, she turned out to be a policeman’s daughter.

“I had pressure,” Schwartz said. “I’d take a drink, I’ll
tell you that, ’cause you’re taking this personally. This isn’t just some bank
robber. And you feel it a little bit with a kid of your own.”

Schwartz’s 13-year-old, Mimi, had heard about the Jogging Rapist in school, and begged her father to let her be a decoy.

“He’s still doing it!” the chief of d’s screamed at Schwartz. “All these men, and you still can’t do anything about it?”

That would never happen. But some nights after dinner,
Schwartz took Mimi in his car as he cruised the Northeast looking for the
rapist. “We drove an hour or two a couple nights a week. There was no risk for
her.”

Along with Schwartz’s ad hoc efforts, 16 patrols scoured
Northeast neighborhoods, while detectives ran down more than 800 leads from the
tip line and elsewhere.

The cops were concentrating on the nights between the 16th
and 25th of every month, when the assailant seemed to strike most often.

Police wanted to literally catch the rapist in the act
because the victims’ descriptions of their attacker were awful. One girl said
he was 17, another said 40. He was described as short — no wait, tall.

Because the descriptions were all over the map, police were
circulating six different composite drawings of the Jogging Rapist. Nearly
useless.

Gray was stoking confusion, changing his hairstyle and
clothing to alter his appearance.

Baker and Maxwell began to realize that any defense attorney
who had paid attention in law school could destroy a case with such weak
eyewitness accounts.

For Schwartz, it was starting to feel desperate.

Then the Jogging Rapist struck on the 900 block of Hartel
Street. And a witness under hypnosis saw a simple detail that changed
everything.

Closing in

At 9 p.m. on Oct. 18, a 16-year-old girl finished
her part-time job at a telemarketing company on Unruh and Castor Avenues.

She and a friend got on a bus at Cottman Avenue. William
Gray had noticed the girls board the bus at Cottman because they were wearing
Catholic school uniforms.

He trailed the bus in his car and saw the 16-year-old step
off near Hartel Street, while her friend remained on the bus and rode off.

Gray drove his car past the girl and parked, then jogged
toward her.

“Do you know what time it is?” he asked, before grabbing
her. When she screamed and fought, he threatened to kill her. She was able to
break loose and run.

Spooked, Gray bolted, vaulting over some bushes, then diving
into his car.

But a woman who had been walking her dog had heard the
screams, then saw a man leap over a hedge and jump into a convertible.

She told police that she remembered the Pennsylvania license
had a 7, a G, and a 4 in it.

Wired and pressed, task force cops threw up a Hail Mary.
They had heard about a cop named Aaron Saylor who was trained to hypnotize
people. It was worth a shot. Saylor dangled a shiny object in the witness’s
face. In a trance, she was able to see an additional digit: 3.

Now detectives had a partial plate to look for. Twice in
their November night patrols, they noticed a drop-top Cadillac with a license
that included 7, G, 4 and 3. The car appeared to be slowly cruising the
streets, like the driver was looking for someone.

Police ran the full plate and it came back to William Gray
of the 5800 block of Sylvester Street. He had no previous sex offenses.

Cops began to keep a close eye on Gray, along with a few
other suspects who had histories of sexual violence.

On the evening of Nov. 26, Gray raped Susanne Worsham five
blocks outside the Northeast search area, in Olney, where the task force had
not been looking. With his Northeast comfort zone saturated by police, Gray had
switched to the neighborhood where he had grown up.

While doctors and nurses tended to Worsham, a detective
dropped a bomb on her parents: He had been following Gray that night on a
hunch. But he had lost the man in traffic.

Even today, Dougherty doesn’t know what to do with that
knowledge. “What can you say?” she asked.

Meanwhile, Maxwell, who had caught some of Baker’s fervor,
had been doing some off-the-books sleuthing of his own.

Not knowing Worsham had been attacked, Maxwell had simply
decided to drive to Gray’s house after his shift ended on Nov. 26. Detective
mystique?

He noticed the suspect’s car was gone. So he waited. Soon
after, Gray rolled in, and Maxwell phoned Baker.

Incensed by Worsham’s rape, in a neighborhood outside the
perimeter he had set up, Baker had Gray brought in for questioning. Gray,
5-foot-11, 150 pounds, was not under arrest.

Baker’s temper flared, especially when Gray refused to say
where he had been before Maxwell saw him return home.

Baker yelled, Gray stayed mum, Maxwell fretted.

“We’re going to be sued, Jerry,” Maxwell told Baker out of
Gray’s earshot. “We’re on shaky legal ground here. And we’re all going to wind
up in Internal Affairs.”

Before Gray was allowed to leave that night, one of the cops
took a Polaroid of him. Gray protested, saying it was illegal.

“He never filed a complaint,” Maxwell said. “He would have
if he’d been innocent.”

Gray walked out of the office, Baker eyeing him the whole
time.

Other detectives in the Northeast liked men who had
previously been involved in sexual misconduct as the suspect.

But Gray very much reminded Maxwell of the description the
psychic had provided.

In her last phone call, the psychic had said she’d had a
vision of a man from behind. He was kneeling in front of a Catholic cross as
the sun set. What was that about?

“I was getting a strong vibe off Gray,” Maxwell said. “I was
getting a very strong vibe.”